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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second presidency of Donald Trump, it can be hard to determine. The authority to initiate armed conflict, traditionally viewed as a crucial congressional authority, has turned into a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has asserted additional of that power for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean.

The power of the purse seems to have largely been taken away from the legislative branch too; now, under the office of budget chief, Russell Vought, much of the power to appropriate government money has likewise defaulted to the presidency, with the White House claiming the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; virtually all bills must now be crammed into budget reconciliation bills, massive recurring must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, large sections of the government do – and it’s not clear how many people are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down for the entire month; there are no signs of it reopening anytime soon. But the presidency keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of dominance of Congress can seem somewhat moot. Why should Americans be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five more congressional positions to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election in the coming weeks, has seized the political imagination of progressives across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to trends happening in other states: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced extreme partisan gerrymandering while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington draw their maps via impartial independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The state measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which installed boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state House representation next year; comparable boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are likewise emulating California’s lead in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with fear and anger to the president’s authoritarian centralization of authority and look for ways to restrain his most extreme impulses. But the proposition is not without controversy. Some critics caution that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts setting off a retaliatory cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to eliminate any possibility of Democratic competitiveness. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely ideological democratic grounds: a electoral area that is drawn in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to characterize a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it occurs at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their own terms. The first argument, that Prop 50 will provoke conservatives to redraw their respective districts in response, fails as a causal point: it is illogical to say that Republicans will be made to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already engaging in such behavior in the absence of those actions. The GOP, I would observe, has required no any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that secure permanent seats for themselves: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the complete absence of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.

The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic difference about how to address the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, but a sort of melancholic wish for a different country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a better situation – in the reality that the majority of Democrats, I think, desire and aspire to – Prop 50 would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is not good to pack and crack targeted population groups; it is not good for elected officials to select their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the level of harm he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what fighting it has transformed us into.

If the legislative branch does not in practice have lawmaking, war making or budgetary authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that Congress still retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our era of sclerotic politics and legislative decline, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the authority to investigate Trump, to broadcast their hearings into his conduct and to force members of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US writer